Playing Poker Blog Articles & Posts

There are plenty of monthly poker memberships that you can purchase, but are they any good? Are they best for you and your current situation? To fully understand this concept you need to know your current skill level, how you learn best, and how to get the best bang for your buck. To start, what is your current skill level? Are you new to poker and starting nearly from scratch? Do you understand basic math? Do you feel very comfortable when playing but get confused occasionally in specific pots? Be honest with yourself when answering this question. If you are a beginner and need a lot of work, that’s ok! We’ve all been there and you will get out of that category quickly if you are motivated to learn.

If you are serious about improving your strategy it’s helpful to know where and how to practice poker. Practicing can range from very cheap to very expensive and can also range from very useful to totally useless…so knowing what is worthwhile is very valuable. In this article I’m going to list a range of ways to train your game to become the best poker player around!

What does the phrase “play solid poker” mean to you? To me it means to make good decisions with good reasoning and to put money in with an edge. It doesn’t mean playing a specific style such as TAG or LAG, nor does it mean that you need to win at Xbb/100. By playing good poker you are making good plays and generating value from your winning hands while minimizing your loss with losing hands. Simply put, if you play solid poker you will win in the long run…and as poker players that’s all we can really ask for!

So how we can start (and continue!) playing winning poker? These 5 tips will point you in the right direction…

An important part of the hand reading basics is the understanding of shape. Ranges do not shape the same for everyone, nor do they shape the same in every situation. For instance, let’s take a 13% opening range of hands. This can be shaped in a few different ways. Let’s first look at how PokerStove sets a 13% range of hands:

This probably looks a little weird. If we were to build ourselves a 13% range it probably wouldn’t include hands like A8s or K9s. The slider in PokerStove (or manually putting a percentage in there) creates ranges based upon this:

Thinking of each poker hand strength within a framework is a great way to quickly classify our hand, and then we can create lines around that. The first thing we need to understand is that hand strengths are relative. What might be value versus one opponent could easily be show down value (SDV) against another. Similarly, there are times when a hand we might classify as SDV against one opponent and it’s really a bluff versus another. Let’s first start by understanding each of our four hand strengths:

What is a blocker in poker? A blocker is a card that limits, or “blocks”, the number of combos of a certain hand. We can use the concept of blockers both preflop and postflop, which makes this concept incredibly important, especially when it comes to hand reading better. To better understand blockers, let’s look at a basic example with preflop blockers:

Because we are dealt the Ac and Ks we block out some important hands. We limit the number of combos of nut hands like AA, KK, and AK, and we also limit other combos like AJ and KQ. To test yourself, do you know how many combos of AA a villain can have? Do you think it’s 1, 3, 6, or 12?

We’ve all gone into auto-pilot mode before. That mode when we aren’t really paying attention and yet decisions are being made. Like when you are driving your car and 10 minutes later you are in your driveway with no recollection of the last 10 minutes. This happens a lot when an activity becomes monotonous and doesn’t require a lot of in-depth thought. However, too many players get into this mode while playing poker and then wonder why their win-rate isn’t as high as it could be. But how can we avoid auto-piloting in poker?